The state with the fancy plates
Book typography-style serifs are for lovers
If you drive (or spend much time riding on a motor vehicle), you probably spend a lot of time looking at license plates, whether you pay attention to them or not. Plates are something that started with a very utilitarian purpose, but became a symbol of personalization for vehicles with the introduction of specialty plate styles (generating many millions of dollars of revenue for states and organizations) and vanity plates. States have spurred controversy and legal battles over compelled speech for the slogans that they put on the plates. And 37 states still controversially use prison labor to produce license plates.
But frankly, I don’t care to enumerate any of that. If you’re interested, Roman Mars did a great episode of 99 Percent Invisible about it, which you can listen to or read online.
What I’m interested in talking about is typography.
I was recently riding my motorcycle to the gym when I noticed a car in front of me with a license plate that looked…off. It looked like a fake plate. As I got closer, I could see “VIRGINIA” peeking down from under their plate frame. Thinking on what made the plate look so wrong, it became obvious: the lettering was in an extremely serif font.
Now, before you think I’m just being an uncultured schmuck who was sheltered from roadways by living in the city for so long, let’s break down the typefaces used by different states. Leeward Productions has a hugely useful resource on this very topic, so I’ll use them as a reference. I did a bit of my own research and came to pretty much the same conclusions.
The overwhelming majority of states use license plate typefaces that would be familiar to most Americans. These are the monospace fonts that are usually sans-serif. They’re largely designed for legibility, and so they bear a strong resemblance to the fonts used by programmers, where the difference between O and 0 is important. This is accomplished through tricks like squaring off the edges of the letter B to make it more distinct from the number 8.
Some states have improved legibility and the differentiability between characters by adding little serifs onto some of the characters. Here’s an example of a plate from Pennsylvania, my home state:
This is definitely sans-serif. If we look at another plate, we’ll see that some characters have serifs added to make them more easily distinguishable:
Notice how the number 1 has serifs, along with J and B. A handful of serifs doesn’t make a serif font, though.
Leeward Productions breaks this style down into four general categories. Without going into too much detail or waffling about which typefaces belong in which categories, they say that 49 states fall into one of these sans-serif categories (with various serifs thrown in here and there1. DC, the Panama Canal Zone (prior to its reincorporation to Panama), Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, various Native American tribes, and Guam, as well as Mexico and Canada, also seem to use these styles.
A few interesting ones to call out:
Delaware plates from 2002 until around the end of 2006 use a fascinating high-weight variant of Arial. Delawareans were apparently displeased enough about this to prompt a change in typeface.
Newfoundland and Labrador and Alberta have the spiciest 3s of any plate typeface I’ve seen. It’s like if a 3 and an ampersand had a baby. Quebec and Mississippi come close, but neither looks like it’s going to give you a papercut. Tennessee has a sort-of similar 3 but it looks like some sort of weird can opener.2
Canada’s Northwest Territories (i.e., Canada’s Alaska) and Nunavut do not have rectangular plates, they have a bear. No license plates are cooler than these.
The Bad River Tribal license plates are pretty badass.
So, 49 states with sans-serif…that leaves only one state without a sans-serif font face: Virginia. Virginia is the only state to have their own wild take on license plate typography. They do not use an off-the-shelf typeface. In fact, there’s not really a commercial typeface that looks quite like it, though some claim that it borrows characters from Times New Roman.
Let’s ignore for a second that Virginia is using a monospace book typography-style serif font. Visually, it’s a bit confusing! Lots of people know about bad kerning (the spacing between letters) and it does tickle that part of the brain, but the visual confusion with Virginia’s plate font is something different, as each letter is evenly spaced.
Serif fonts are made to be easy to read. Hell, you’re probably reading this post in a serif font. Each letter has a slightly different width. A “W” will take up more horizontal space than an “I”. License plates can’t do that, though. Different license plate numbers would be different widths. It would be impossible to know whether a vanity plate would actually fit on the plate. If you ensured that the longest possible plate number (visually) fit on the plate, the shortest possible plate number would take up far too little room.
To make every character the same width in Virginia’s font, many letters had to be narrowed. If, for instance, you smoosh the letter “A” horizontally, you’re smooshing the vertical stems of the letter as well. This makes them thinner. Numbers in any font tend to be roughly the same width, so they are the “correct” weight, but many serif letters needed to be narrowed.
Here’s an example, where you can see that the numbers appear very “bold” while some letters (namely the A) appear quite narrow in comparison. The stem on the “J” should be roughly the same width as the stem on the “1”, but because the hook of the “J” takes up horizontal space, the letter needed to be narrowed, leading to the “J” being much skinnier than the “1”.
So why do they do this? I think we can safely rule out legibility: there’s really nothing about this typeface that makes it easier to read at a distance. In the example above, the “A” appears very skinny, for instance, because the serifs on the bottom take up extra space. If the serifs had been modified (or included only on the inside of the letter), the character could have been drawn wider and made more distinguishable.
I imagine that readability wasn’t a factor in this typeface at all. License plates are meant to be read at a distance—often through fairly low-resolution cameras—and to resist the visibility-decreasing effects of debris or weather.
Besides sheer visibility, license plates have the unusual typographic constraint of representing usually-random-ish uppercase characters. “Normal” typefaces are designed to be applied to words and phrases, where each word has a distinctive shape. Serifs and ligatures help to reduce fatigue by making it easier to scan text. License plates rarely feature words (with the obvious exception of vanity plates), meaning the typeface needs to optimize for the legibility of individual characters rather than whole words.
In 2004, the state of Indiana rolled out a new design for their plates, and law enforcement was not happy with the result. They claimed it was difficult to read at a distance: the blocky letters and heavy weight made it difficult to identify characters. Indiana’s previous (and subsequent) designs actually made the letters in the plate smaller than the digits. Separately, a design Indiana issued in 2008 featuring the text “In God We Trust” alongside (yes, next to!) the plate number. The letters on the plate were stacked to make room, making them difficult to read. Criminals allegedly found these plates appealing because they were difficult to read.
A 1994 study3 by Dr. Frank Scrhieber of the University of South Dakota investigates the legibility of typography on road signs by blurring text in various typefaces and then reducing the blur level until participants were able to read the text or distinguish symbols. Leeward Productions shows a blurred comparison of the default commercial license plate font from 3M and a replica of Pennsylvania’s license plate font:
If we replicate this test with Keystone State and the Virginia plate I included above, there are some obvious issues:
Pennsylvania’s version of the plate remains fairly legible, with each letter losing its form only slightly. Virginia’s “A” loses definition at even fairly low blur levels, and the 1 becomes entirely sloppy. I’d have a difficult time discerning that B or J from other similar letters under challenging visibility conditions. I’d argue that the letter weight and narrowness of Virginia’s typeface makes it a bold choice.
Another desirable property of a license plate typeface is its ability to resist forgery. FE-Schrift is a font developed in the 70s and rolled out in the 90s to make it harder to forge on plates. I was surprised to learn that ANPR technology (“automatic number-plate recognition,” or the stuff cops and companies use to read plates) was developed in the 70s. By the time FE-Schrift was rolled out in the 90s, not only was it possible to read plates with software, it was possible to identify whether the typeface was accurate. Wild stuff, though I doubt this is much of a concern today since ANPR technology is realtime and matches the plate to the vehicle using the internet.
A commenter from the internet speculates that Virginia’s unusual choice for typography on their plates is on-brand. They have serif text on their flag and (according to the commenter) on their plaques and buildings. Keeping things consistent would make sense.
As a counterpoint, the typeface Virginia uses is only 30 years old, having been rolled out in 19934 after they ran out (or nearly ran out) of license plate numbers, which had been limited to six characters5. It would seem unusual to have a new typeface commissioned for such an event simply to support consistency with the state flag and some plaques.
To help shed light on this, I’ve reached out to the Virginia DMV’s media contact. She has been excellent in helping to investigate this, but was unable to find any information internally within the DMV. At the time of writing, she had reached out to other government entities for assistance. If I receive any new information, I’ll post an update.
I should also note that Virginia, while special, is not strictly unique. The US Department of State also issues plates with an identical serif font. Since USDS is in DC and DC sits on top of Virginia like a little hat, it would be extremely unsurprising to me if Virginia was producing plates for them. In fact, I’d be more surprised if the Department of State was manufacturing their own plates.
It’s also an interesting note that Virginia’s motorcycle license plates do not use the same typeface, instead using a much more “traditional” typeface like most other states. It’s unclear why, though I expect the smaller plates necessitate better legibility.
Curiously, while verifying this, I found an Amazon listing for replica plates for all 50 states. These replicas seem to use a wide mix of typography, including seven distinctly-serif typefaces. This is obviously incorrect, as you can look up these plates for yourself. It seems curious that they wouldn’t simply pick 4-5 accurate typefaces and just reuse them randomly if they didn’t want to actually try to match the typefaces in the real plates.
Yes, I did look at 60+ license plate styles to inspect all the 3s. Please do not write to me to argue for your state’s plates’ spicy 3.
I’m linking to the PDF on the internet archive’s copy of the paper from USD. I was unable to find an active link outside of for-profit websites.
I’ll note that 15q.net was a great resource from someone deeply passionate about license plates. However, despite going into depth about typefaces for other states (notably Delaware and Indiana), nothing was mentioned about the shift to a serif typeface for Virginia.
The new plates use seven characters.